BOOK REVIEW: Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald

Review by Nathan Seppa

By Science News, 13:29 PM April 18, 2013

In the 1970s, most classical musicians were men. Nobody thought much of it until some orchestras started concealing applicants’ gender. As such blind auditions became more common over the next 20 years, the proportion of women hired into major symphony orchestras doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent.

Banaji and Greenwald have made careers of ferreting out bias, cautioning that the mind doesn’t operate in a vacuum but rather proceeds from a starting point. Borrowing on their own and others’...